If gin was the lubricant for moving into an urban, industrial society, then perhaps gaming is surging because it is the lubricant for moving into an age even more dramatically alienating.

Many people I talk to about games say that games are particularly gratifying after a day at work where they felt like they “did nothing.” The mechanics of games – especially the good ones – are such that you always work on something achievable and the subsequent rewards are always psychically tangible.

Examples include grinding for a new set of armor in WoW, beating your high score, or simply doing some weird stuff in Civ IV just to see what happens. You can actually do “something” in a game and feel it, vs the nothing you did all day otherwise.

The truth is most of us are doing things at our jobs, but the results are invisible and spiritually meaningless. What is actually happening when you spend the whole day filing TPS reports? Seems
like nothing.

It’s Marx’s alienation version 2.0, and gaming might be how we respond.

(These thoughts inspired in part by a talk with my brother and, ironically, a lot of gin.)